Wizard's Pact
A Wizard's Pact is a mutual non-aggression agreement between two wizards. Any player, human or AI, can propose this treaty to another, unless there is a War ongoing between the two players. However, unless the offer was made between two AI players, the other party has to accept the offer for the treaty to form. Ways of forming a Wizard's Pact For the chance of an AI player offering the treaty to the human player, see AI to Player Diplomacy, positive diplomacy section. Once the offer has been made, selecting the reply "Accept" is enough to form the treaty. Rejecting the offer might result in the AI player offering additional gold or a spell and repeating the request. Accepting it this time results in the human player gaining whichever resources were offered. Rejecting it again has no negative consequences. If the treaty offer is going to be made, but the human player is having an Alliance with another wizard who is at War with the offering wizard, they will first request the human player to break that Alliance. Refusal of that request results in a penalty to Visible Relations. For the chance of two AI players forming this treaty between them, see AI to AI Diplomacy. In order for the human player to offer this treaty to a rival wizard, they have to click on their portrait on the MAGIC screen to initiate an audience, and the rival wizard needs to be willing to grant one. To make the offer, select "Propose Treaty" and "Wizard's Pact" from the menu. Upon doing so, the rival wizard will go through the following process to decide on a reply : # Check Visible Relation. If it's lower than +10, immediately refuse the offer without an changes in any temporal variables, or any effect at all. The wizard completely ignores the offer as though it was never made in the first place. Note the inconsistency, it is required to have 15 Visible Relation for the AI wizard to make this offer to the human player, but only 10 is enough for the human player to make the offer. # Calculate X= Treaty Interest + Hidden Relation + Visible Relation + Personality Modifier + Military Modifier - Proposal Difficulty + random (1-100), where Proposal Difficulty is 75. # If X< -75 then the offer is refused. If X<-50 but >=-75 then they'll demand a spell. If X>=-50 but <0 then they'll demand gold. If X>=0 then they'll accept the proposal. # Finally, the Peace Interest and Trade Interest variables are reduced by 10, and the Treaty Interest variable is reduced by a random amount between 30-60. This process is slightly different in the 1.50 unofficial patch. Step 1, 3 and 4 are unchanged. Step 2 calculates X= Treaty Interest /2 + Hidden Relation + Visible Relation + Personality Modifier + Military Modifier - Proposal Difficulty - 10*Game Difficulty + random(1-30) instead. The Military Modifier in this calculation is significantly different than originally. Effects of a Wizard's Pact A Wizard's Pact's primary goal is to maintain stable, peaceful relations two players. It achieves this through several effects, including Relation improvement over time At the end of each turn there is a 50% chance of generating a base strength +random(1-3) Diplomatic Reaction event with no message. In the unofficial 1.50 patch, the chance for this is 1/3 only. This effect is strong enough to improve relations significantly over a long period of time, even if natural gravitation towards the Starting Relation is reducing the effect. No hostility AI wizards will always set Hostility to None when evaluating it if a Wizard's Pact is in effect. Due to this, they will not willingly attack the player's cities or units, and will avoid casting hostile spells at them. They can, however, attack the player by accident, for example engineers building a road into the human player's cities. In the 1.40 unofficial patch, the AI gains the ability to cancel these attacks at the time they would happen, and retract the movement of their units. They will always do this to make sure they don't violate the WIzard's Pact. Unfortunately, the change in the shortest path algorithm allows walking through cells occupied by units in a much looser fashion, so they will attempt to move through these cells and end up retracting movement rather frequently, resulting in stacks being unable to proceed to their destination. In the 1.50 unofficial patch, the AI players will never take a path leading through a stack of another player unless that is their intended target, and they are also able to chance orders on their troops every turn, ensuring that such "take-back" moves happen much less frequently. The advantage of the human player Due to turn order, the AI players are unable to break the treaty and attack in the same turn. See AI to Player Diplomacy for more information. This means that it is always safe to hit the End Turn button if there is a Wizard's Pact formed. Contrary to this, the human player can attack the same turn they Break Treaty. This means that they can always strike first, as long as the troops used for this purpose have sufficient movement allowance to reach their targets, providing a huge strategic advantage, The responsibility of the human player When forming a Wizard's Pact, the human player agrees not to enter a 2 square radius of the rival wizard's cities. Violating this will result in a negative Diplomatic Reaction. Repeated offense results in the AI wizard breaking the treaty. See AI to Player Diplomacy for more details. Although AI wizards also check for the presence of each other's troops, this check is done rarely instead of every turn, and does not have much of an effect. However, the 1.50 unofficial patch removes this check entirely, recognizing that the AI lacks the features to understand the concept of not moving into forbidden territory altogether, and the possibility of implementing such without severely interfering with the AI's normal operation being close to zero. This limitation fairly balances out the previous point, making sure the pact isn't always advantageous to the human player only.Category:Diplomacy